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Nokia is dying (thanks to microsoft)

"While RIM will likely survive by evolving into a smaller form, Nokia looks to be headed to another, more grim fate. The Finnish handset giant has lost its identity by dumping its own smartphone OS efforts and embracing Windows Phone. It lost its market leadership in overall phone sales to Samsung. Nokia bled billions of dollars in losses over the last year and is now worth just 10 percent of what it was 5 years ago.
...
CEO Stephen Elop said in February 2011 that the company was looking at a two-year "transition period," and his time is just about up; many feel he needs to go in order for Nokia to survive. "

I live in the country Nokia is from and I've been following the development of the company somewhat for the last few years.

All I can say is, Elop is either a clever plant, or a colossally incompetent moron. The sheer stupidity of his decisions is so absurd, it's hard to believe that someone that incompetent could be in that line of work, which makes the first option quite likely and many here are of the opinion that he was deliberately planted in Nokia to bring it down.

The decisions he has made are simply one catastrophe after another. Nokia was the leading cellphone maker when he got in charge, and in just a few years he managed to squander the entire company in a way worthy of a million facepalms. Ever since Elop got in charge, watching Nokia has been like watching a train wreck - it's horrible, but you just can't look away.

But that's not to say Elop is the only one to blame. He's probably just doing what his sith master Darth Ballmer wants him to do. The ones I would assign the most blame are the board of Nokia. They are the ones who let that clown in charge, who have stood by while he's squandered the assets of the company and done nothing while the stock of Nokia has plummeted. If there were any justice in the world, both Elop and the board of Nokia would be charged and convicted as criminals, but seeing how the Finnish justice system is a corrupt organ that takes orders from that circle-jerk of businessmen and politicians who treat this country as their personal playground, that's not likely to happen.

Here's what I think happened - this is just my own conjecture, so take it with a grain of salt: just before Elop, Nokia was suffering from a lack of direction and proper, strong leadership. They were scared of Apple's success, and they couldn't figure out a way to move with the times. So rather than admit their ignorance and seek help, maybe from some up-and-coming visionary who knows about today's technology, maybe someone in-house who was involved with the Meego project, they made a deal with Microsoft. Maybe they were too proud to admit they needed help, or maybe they got greedy. Either way, Microsoft probably gave them a nice inside deal - the board could save their own assess by making this deal putting that clown Elop in charge. They probably knew that the company would be destroyed, but they figured they could make some nice profits for themselves, buy new cars and summer houses and something nice for the little missus.

And Microsoft could only win from the deal: either Elop would succeed in riding Nokia's success and thus giving their Windows Phone platform - which was already in trouble at that time - a nice boost, or he would bring down Nokia with him and Microsoft could utilize Nokia's patent portfolio to hinder their competition. The deal was so risky to Nokia, so profitable for Microsoft, it's hard to believe the entire board would not have foreseen it. That is why I suspect an inside deal with the board and Microsoft.

Nokia is the prime example as a corporate mismanagement can lead to ruin a company.
But since, as usual, the only who lose are the end users, given that competition will decrease while the top managers will keep their huge benefit in any case, is pretended that a system where few people command without assuming any financial responsibility on their shoulders, is perfect.

Actually Nokia started counting Asha phones as smartphones now, so their self-proclaimed share will be higher than 5%.

Currently the situation at Nokia seems stable, sales are almost flat QoQ. This could of course go downhill again once they launch a tablet, just ask BlackBerry who are already past their costly tablet adventure.

It seems nokia has been picking up bad habits from their new sugar daddy microsoft.

Nokia has been recently caught violating user privacy: Nokia cell phones route secure https connections via their own servers and decrypt your data while they're at it. This applies at least to their Asha phones, possibly others as well. Nokia justifies this with "optimization". Other cellphone browsers (eg. Opera mini) do the same but only with non-secure plaintext connections.